Dental Hygienist
16,454 active US providers register Dental Hygienist as their primary taxonomy. That is 0.2% of every provider in the registry, and the 96th largest of 584 specialties with a page here.
- Taxonomy code
- 124Q00000X
- Grouping
- Dental Providers
- Classification
- Dental Hygienist
- Active providers
- 16,454
- States covered
- 51 of 51
What the code means
An individual who has completed an accredited dental hygiene education program, and an individual who has been licensed by a state board of dental examiners to provide preventive care services under the supervision of a dentist. Functions that may be legally delegated to the dental hygienist vary based on the needs of the dentist, the educational preparation of the dental hygienist and state dental practice acts and regulations, but always include, at a minimum, scaling and polishing the teeth. To avoid misleading the public, no occupational title other than dental hygienist should be used to describe this dental auxiliary.
Definition quoted verbatim from the NUCC Health Care Provider Taxonomy code set, version 25.1. Not paraphrased.
Where they are
Counted by practice location, not by mailing address or by licence state. A provider practising across a state line is counted where they practise.
| State | Providers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| California | 1,950 | |
| Colorado | 1,270 | |
| Oregon | 1,177 | |
| Washington | 1,005 | |
| Wisconsin | 948 | |
| Michigan | 915 | |
| New York | 731 | |
| Texas | 692 | |
| Florida | 623 | |
| Pennsylvania | 499 | |
| Maine | 463 | |
| Arizona | 460 | |
| Connecticut | 432 | |
| Missouri | 372 | |
| Illinois | 350 |
Showing the 15 largest of 51 states with at least one.
Who registers under this code
15,937 of these are people and 517 are organisations, so 3% of the code is businesses rather than clinicians. Half of them had registered by 2017, and 5,610 registered in the last five years, 34% of the current population.
That is close to the pace of the registry as a whole.
Where the practices are
By practice-location city. City counts are noisier than state counts, because a large employer files one address for many providers.
- PORTLAND, OR272
- DENVER, CO180
- SALEM, OR121
- COLORADO SPRINGS, CO120
- SEATTLE, WA112
- SAN DIEGO, CA111
- WAUKESHA, WI107
- VANCOUVER, WA104
- ALBUQUERQUE, NM103
- MILWAUKEE, WI93
What else they list
Providers whose primary code is Dental Hygienist most often carry these secondary taxonomies as well. This is the closest thing the registry has to a map of which specialties overlap in practice, and it is not published anywhere else.
| Also listed | Providers | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Dental Assistant | 61 | 0.4% |
| General Practice Dentistry | 42 | 0.3% |
| Dentist | 38 | 0.2% |
| Specialist | 20 | 0.1% |
| Student in an Organized Health Care Education/Training Program | 12 | 0.1% |
| Dental Clinic/Center | 10 | 0.1% |
| Health Educator | 9 | 0.1% |
| Health & Wellness Coach | 9 | 0.1% |
Looking up a specific provider
These counts come from the monthly NPPES file. To check one provider, use their NPI: the lookup reads the live registry and shows whether the identifier is still active, which the monthly file cannot tell you about the last few weeks.
Counts from npidata_pfile_20050523-20260712.csv, built 2026-08-09. Primary taxonomy only, deactivated identifiers excluded.